12/27/2009

Why We Love Christmas

So, it's Christmas again. Definitely it's one the most pleasant holidays, and almost everybody loves it.

We here in IBSurgeon love it too, but, frankly speaking, not for presents and good wishes and discount season.

After the Christmas we always have a hot season - many databases are being broken during holidays. While administrators are drinking toasts and enjoy winter vacations, Firebird and InterBase databases are keep working.

Since now there are at least several millions of Firebird installations (only www.webceo.com made more than 1 million installations) it's just a matter of statistics fluctuations when unattended database becomes corrupted - due to the lack of space or due to the HDD crash and - oops, no backups were stored or all of them were corrupted too.

Firebird can be reliable, but it can't fight statistics and human factor impact (as any other database software too) . It's always a small chance to miss configuration item or don't pay enough attention to log files...

Now we are beta-testing second generation of our FBDataGuard, intended to decrease such risks and help Firebird run smoothly. In 2010 we will release it and, I hope, it will leave us without urgent recoveries after next Christmas. This year we are on the alert.